Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer #2_UK)

by Laini Taylor

  “But not us,” he said, and she felt the warm weight of his hand on her back, and turned in shock to look up at him. “Our duty is here,” he said. “I hope you understand.”

  “Of course I do,” said Sarai, who would not have let him come in any case. This wasn’t his fight. She hoped his fight was over, and anyway, it was best not to tempt Minya’s forbearance any further. Sarai knew better than to imagine she’d forgiven him. This could be just a game of quell in which she found herself outnumbered in enemy territory. Who was to say she wouldn’t yet seek her vengeance when she regained her advantage?

  Azareen was blinking back tears. Sarai, moved, pretended not to notice. “We don’t need warriors,” she assured them.

  “Can we come anyway?” someone asked.

  Sarai turned to see two Tizerkane standing back, awkward and hesitant. She knew them, of course. She knew everyone in Weep. They were Ruza and Tzara. Lazlo’s friends.

  “You want to come?” she asked, caught off guard. Lazlo had told her, despairing, how deep their hatred of godspawn ran.

  “If you’ll have us,” said Ruza, looking uncomfortable. “If it were me gone missing, he’d come looking. Not that I’m special, I mean. He’d come looking for anyone.” He turned to the golden godson and wrinkled his nose with unconvincing distaste. “Even you.”

  “I know he would,” said Thyon, who understood now, as he hadn’t before, what it was to help someone for no other reason than that they needed it. “Can I come, too?” he asked, afraid that the girl— the ghost—would reject him and that they would leave him behind.

  And Sarai did hesitate. She had not forgotten what it was like inside his dreams—how airless and tight they were, like coffins. And she remembered him at Lazlo’s window, too, arguing, right before she died. His manner had been so guarded, so scathing and cold.

  He seemed different now. Not to mention, he had saved her. “If you wish,” she said.

  Calixte appealed to come, too, and was welcomed, and that made nine: five godspawn and four humans. Two silk sleighs and one cut in the sky. That was the math of their rescue operation, and there wasn’t a moment to lose.

  Chapter 56

  Pirates of the Devourer

  In every world, the seraphim had cut two portals: a front door and a back door, so to speak—a way in from the previous world, and a way out to the next. When navigating the Continuum, there were two directions: not north and south, right and left, up and down, but al-Meliz and ez-Meliz. Toward Meliz, and away from Meliz. The seraph home world, where the Faerers’ journey had begun, was the only compass point that mattered.

  The cut in the sky over Weep was Zeru’s ez-Meliz portal. The world on the other side was called Var Elient, and it was not all red sea and mist. But the red sea, called Arev Bael, went on for many weeks’ journey, and had eaten more ships than it had ever let pass. The seraph Thakra, in an age long gone, had dubbed it the Devourer, and balked— or so the story went—at destroying the monsters that swam in it.

  Var Elient was a world whose point of pride was that its monsters were too monstrous for even gods to destroy.

  And maybe they were, or maybe the Faerers had just been too tired after destroying Zeru’s beasts.

  Only the foolhardy and desperate ever sailed the Devourer now that there were airships. There had been, for a long time, a high portal tax and a thriving transport business in flying outworlders to the island that wasn’t really an island, but a cut tezerl stalk—one of the vast white stalks that grew out of the sea. They used to come to buy magical children. It wasn’t a secret. No one in Var Elient could afford them themselves, but they had relied on the tax and the transport revenue. And then it all came to an end.

  They blamed Nova, as well they might, since she was the one who crashed a stolen kite skiff on the island, slew the guards, and took over, killing on sight anyone who came after, and collecting their airships like it was a portal harbor.

  But it wasn’t really her fault. The portal, which was Var Elient’s al-Meliz door, had closed before she got there, and stayed closed. Skathis’s auctions were over.

  She had found three children in cages and freed them, but she had only freed them so far. She might have taken them somewhere else—anywhere else—so they could have some other life. But she chose to stay, and what could they do? She made the choice for them all, so that she could be near the portal when it reopened, as she never doubted it would.

  And that is how Kiska, Werran, and Rook became pirates of the Devourer—“pirates” in the nonmagical sense—and grew up boarding and seizing airships over the roiling red sea. Perhaps Nova had bowed to fate, and determined to embody the word that defined her.

  They were loyal to her in the blind way of saved children, but as they came home from Zeru in the godsmetal warship, they were not quite as blind as they had been before.

  “That was Minya,” Kiska said under her breath as Nova guided the seraph down to their island, to moor it as though it were just another ship they’d seized for their fleet. “We just stole this ship from Minya.”

  Werran shook his head. He might have believed it was her for a moment, but it was deniable after the fact. “How could it be? She’d be our age.” He was holding one arm gingerly against him, his wrist a mess from his ghost bite. “Whoever that was, was just a little girl.”

  “Maybe she was Minya’s daughter,” said Rook. The math would have had her giving birth at fourteen or fifteen, which was uncomfortable, but not impossible.

  “Don’t be stupid. You both know it was her.”

  “So what if it was?” asked Werran with a belligerence born of discomfiture. “What are we supposed to do about it now?”

  “Go back?” suggested Kiska, hugging her arms around herself and pacing. She’d shut off her gravity boots and they clicked against the metal floor with each step. “Make sure they’re all right?” The words all right nearly stuck in her throat. She darted an uneasy glance in Lazlo’s direction. He was lying deathly still with the crook of his arm flung across his face, concealing it. If what he had been saying— screaming—was true, then they were not all right.

  “We can’t go back,” said Rook.

  “Why not?” Kiska stopped pacing. “We have plenty of ships.”

  “That’s hardly the point,” he said, shooting a look toward Nova. There was a pounding in the base of his skull, and his joints ached and his fingers were numb from the lightning blast that had thrown him. It reminded him of being five years old, in a cage, with guards teaching him what to be afraid of. Nova had freed him from that.

  They all watched her and fell silent. She hadn’t said a word during the entire transition between worlds, and they hadn’t bothered her, for the ostensible reason that she had to concentrate to pilot the immense ship through the narrow gap. But that wasn’t the only reason. They didn’t like to admit it, even to themselves, but they were worried.

  There was something unknowable and untouchable about Nova. They’d lived with her for most of their lives, but not for most of hers. They were twenty, twenty-one. She was...well, they didn’t know, but she was old. Her life reached deep into a past they couldn’t imagine. What they knew of her was like...like rain on the lid of a cistern. They couldn’t even see the dark water below, much less guess what it held. And sometimes her eyes were faraway, and sometimes they were murderous. She could be funny, and she could cut throats, and she could sink into silence for days. But whatever else she was, she was, above all, single-minded.

  Nova had a purpose, or she’d had a purpose: to find her sister. So what would she do now?

  The ship—citadel, seraph—came to a stop, and Nova moved for the first time in many minutes. She’d been floating out in the center of the room, the white bird gliding its endless circles around her, but now she turned and came toward where they were waiting in the door. Lazlo still lay on the walkway, and Kiska was glad to see Nova free him.

  For all of half a second.

  She released his legs f
rom the metal, and he felt it, and flung his arm off his face to come upright, but even as he rose, two masses of godsmetal, each as big as his head, detached from the walkway and flew up to meld themselves around his upper arms and shoulders and lift him into the air so that he was suspended, feet dangling. “Let me go!” he said, hoarse from all his futile screaming. Nova went around him and he tried to grab at her but couldn’t reach, and she didn’t seem to notice or hear him holler. She just floated him along behind her.

  Kiska, Rook, and Werran were three abreast in the doorway. They’d have to step aside to let her pass, but for the moment none of them moved. They looked from Lazlo’s grief-ravaged face to Nova’s, which was very weary, and...blankly benign. The wrongness of it held them all rooted as she slowed to a stop before them, waiting for them to step out of her way.

  Why wasn’t she grieving?

  Though they’d been fearing the form her grief would take, this clear lack of it was jarring. Not to mention seeing her cavalierly take control of a young man who was, well, one of them. They didn’t know him, but what did that matter? He was innocent, not to mention that he bore more than a passing resemblance to Werran and was probably his brother. Nova freed slaves; she didn’t take them. And of course it was even worse than that, if what Lazlo said was true: By taking this ship and leaving the others behind—who were also their kin and kindred—they had doomed at least one of them.

  “Nova,” said Kiska in an uncertain tone. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Do?” Nova regarded Lazlo. “Well, I suppose that depends on him. I always planned to keep Skathis in a birdcage.”

  That didn’t answer the question. They would have helped her keep Skathis in a birdcage. “But he’s not Skathis,” Kiska pointed out.

  “No, but he is a Mesarthim smith, and that is a very rare treasure.”

  “Treasure?” repeated Rook. In the course of their piracy, they had looted many a treasure, but they had never stolen people. Having been rescued from the certainty of slavery themselves, the very thought was anathema to them. “But you can’t just keep him,” he blurted, as though nothing were more obvious.

  “I have to,” said Nova. “I need him if I’m going to find Kora.”

  Rook’s mouth opened and then closed again. There was a moment of stunned silence, which Nova took advantage of to move past them, pushing between Rook and Kiska, who stood as though their boots were magnetized to the floor, even as Lazlo was pulled past, struggling, the bird following in their wake.

  In a low voice, Werran asked Kiska, “You’re sure Korako’s dead?” After all, he and Rook hadn’t heard the mind chorus of dead she’s dead she’s dead, or seen the memory of the knife going into her heart the way Kiska had.

  “Very sure,” she replied, chilled to her core.

  “Then what was that about?” asked Werran. They all felt as though some fundamental truth had been yanked out from under them, leaving them in free fall.

  “She’s lost it,” said Rook. “Did you see her eyes? That’s madness.”

  “It’s grief,” said Kiska. “It’s shock.”

  “It’s kidnapping,” said Werran. “It’s slavery.”

  “I know,” she said, and they followed Nova down the passage.

  There was a surreal familiarity to the route. They came to the crossing of passages, and they all stopped in their tracks, hit by the same memory at the same moment. They had all three followed Korako this way. The nursery was to the left. Kiska had the strangest feeling that if she went that way, she would find it all exactly as it had been on that long-ago day when Minya had screamed and tried to stop Korako from taking her away.

  It shamed her that she had said and done nothing on Minya’s behalf when Nova took her away. “This isn’t right,” she said.

  They went through a door into a large room with a dining table at its center. The far wall was an arcade of archways open to a garden. The metal was almost entirely covered in a profusion of flowers and vines. There was a large chair at the head of the table. Nova pulled it back and sat, her arms on the armrests as though she were trying on some new role. She was already pirate queen of the Devourer. Now she was captain of an avenging angel that no force in the Continuum could stop.

  Lazlo was still suspended in the air, and he was still struggling. Seeing Nova in Minya’s chair, he thought, was almost too neat: one foe sliding into another’s place. The game board was even sitting there, but all the pieces had fallen off and scattered across the floor, and in Lazlo’s state of extremis, that seemed to say everything. When this game was over, would anyone be left standing?

  “I won’t help you,” he told her, and there was venom in his own voice.

  She turned to him, but her face was tired, incurious. He knew she didn’t understand him, but he spoke anyway, because threats and promises were all he had. “Whatever you plan to do, whatever you mean to use me for, you’ll fail.” There was a new darkness in him, as though a root of his soul had tapped down into a hidden pool of poison and drunk, tainting him with vengeance, and a will to do violence that he had never known before.

  She had kept him from keeping his promise to Sarai, and it felt as though, in so doing, Nova had remade him into a shadow version of himself. “You’ll slip up,” he said, “and I’ll be ready, and I’ll take back my power and make you pay.”

  In response, with a flick of her wrist, she sent up a spray of mesarthium from the floor, and met it with a spray from above. The two fused in the middle and formed, in an instant, a cage all the way around him. It shoved at his legs, and pushed down his head as it shrank, closing him in. It was so small. He couldn’t even sit up in it, and his legs, already bruised from his earlier attempts to free them, were torqued back against his body. He let out a roar of pain.

  “Stop!” cried Kiska, taking a few frantic steps toward them. “Nova, he’s not our enemy. He’s like us.”

  The gaze Nova turned to her stopped her in her tracks. It was dark with suspicion, as though she were just now seeing them for who they truly were. “My enemies are your enemies,” she said.

  “He’s not—” Kiska started, but Nova cut her off.

  “You’re not going to stop me from finding her. No one’s ever going to stop me again.”

  It was more than Kiska could bear. She said, in distress, her voice rich with empathy, “Nova, Kora’s dead.”

  The word dead possessed the air. For an instant Kiska beheld the same bottomless anguish that Sarai had seen in Nova’s eyes, and then it was gone, and there was only wrath.

  And the wrath exploded.

  Chapter 57

  Awe, Elation, Horror

  “I wish we had the dragon,” said Ruza, clutching the safety rail of the silk sleigh, and not sounding quite as unflappable as one might hope one’s warrior escort to sound.

  “I’d even take the winged horse,” said Thyon, likewise clinging. Both were remembering the mesarthium beasts Lazlo had quickened to fly Eril-Fane, Azareen, and Suheyla up to the citadel. They seemed a much sturdier method of transport just now than this contraption of silk and gas rocked by every breeze.

  The city was very far below, this aerial perspective supremely new. Weep’s domes and byways made patterns that could not have been guessed at from below, and the devastation of the ripped-up anchors was clear to see. It would have been fascinating if it weren’t so terrifying.

  In one sleigh, the negligible weight of Sarai, Minya, and Sparrow— a ghost, a stick-child, and an underfed sixteen-year-old—was offset by Thyon and Ruza. In the other, Feral and Ruby shared with Calixte and Tzara. Sarai and Feral were the primary pilots, though Ruby and Sparrow could each step in if needed. They’d practiced in the pavilion, learning how to operate the outflow valves and, when it came time to descend, release the ulola gas and slowly deflate the pontoons.

  The trouble would come in getting back again—if the worst happened and they failed to achieve their aim of reclaiming both Lazlo and their home. (Well, they were all
mindful that this was not the very worst that could happen, but they did not speak those other scenarios aloud.) Once the ulola gas was released, which it would have to be for them to descend, the craft would be unable to re-ascend. It was an imperfect device.

  They had one advantage that humans would not, and that advantage was Sparrow. Ozwin had given her some ulola seedlings to take with them. If it came to it, she could cultivate them as only she could—with unnatural speed—and essentially grow more gas for a return journey. It was a last resort, but not one Sarai wished to consider, because if it came to that, it would mean Lazlo was lost, and she could not bear the possibility.

  With the citadel gone from Weep’s sky, it was not easy to guess precisely where the floating orb had been, and the warp had been hard enough to spot when they knew just where it was. That, combined with their novice flight skills, made for a fraught several hours of flying in circles.

  “On the upside,” said Sarai, trying to contain her growing frustration, “I’m really learning how to maneuver this thing.”

  It was Ruby who finally spotted it—the quirk in the fabric of the air—and as they circled over to it, the godspawn found their anxiety somewhat alleviated by their anticipation of the humans’—and Minya’s—reactions to what they were about to see. Even under dire circumstances, there is a unique pleasure in introducing the bizarre and inconceivable to others.

  Ruby did the honors. As Feral brought the craft near, she reached out to the vague, dreamy line in the air and, as Lazlo had, grasped its edges and tugged it open.

  The ensuing silence was the sound of two warriors, an alchemist, an acrobat, and Minya forgetting how to breathe. It was short-lived. Calixte shattered it with an exclamation. The words were in her language and thus unintelligible, but they were clearly profane, and captured the mood perfectly: awe, elation, horror.

  They saw into the other world.

  To their immense relief, the citadel was visible in the middle distance. It had been twisted into a nightmare version of itself. In Weep, the seraph had stood upright, arms outstretched in a pose of supplication. Here, it was hunched and contorted, as though it were cowering under the low gray sky, afraid to stand upright lest the mist enshroud it. Its wings, which had been elegant, were ragged, and the ridges of its spine stood out sharply on its gaunt, warped back. Its arms were wrapped around itself, as though it were cold or afraid, and its face, which had, before, been placid, was a rictus of rage, eyes tight shut, mouth open in a scream.